Silent sociality - checking up on what my friends are up to when convenient, and posting my own state knowing that I won't be disturbing others (unless they have explicitly asked to be alerted).

Small-group sociality - Jaiku is not about celebrity. I'm interested in sharing state with a small group I'm nearly always in contact with, what Mimi Ito has called full-time intimate community.

Mobile sociality - Jaiku was designed with the mobile "living phonebook" interface in mind. SMS alerts crowding the inbox of one of the few working personal and functional communication channels is not my idea of improving communication. I use the SMS-in posting to Jaiku when I'm using my Nokia 8800 and with my N70 I use the Jaiku phonebook.

Background sociality - Jaiku allows me to integrate other online identities and feeds (including delicious, flickr and any RSS) into my single jaiku presence feed. This is done in a way that doesn't confuse these background posts with my explicit state messages.

In addition to regular presence and feed aggregation, Jaiku does a lot of innovative things. The mobile phone application uses Bluetooth personal area network to display information about nearby users, and apparently can also use the phone’s calendar to set status automatically. This is very smart use of context, and something I hope mobile applications would start doing more.

Jaiku can utilize geographical location of users, but I’d love to see integration with the Plazes network and/or pulling of the location information from my GeoRSS feed. Jaiku already is smart enough to pull my social network from Google Talk contacts, so there is hope that they will be smart enough to also reuse existing position information.

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Back in last July – when choosing photos to use in the epic The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora post – I noticed that it is quite fascinating to look at the various tablets and mobile phones we’ve been using over the years. Back then they all were so new, shiny, and exciting, and yet hardware moves so fast that...

Since Midgard is now able to import my Jaiku presence information, I’ve finally switched to it completely from Twitter. Since the discussion about the merits of these two different services are being discussed actively, I though I should give some of my reasons: